Integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Azure Function Webhooks

Dynamics 365 - the cloud-backed ERP and CRM system built by the tech-giant Microsoft Corporation used to offer seamless connectivity between various departments, enhanced social engagement, quick scalability, easy deployment and valuable insights from business intelligence and analytics. A couple of years ago, Dynamics 365 was rebranded - where applications related to CRM bundled under the name of Customer Engagement Plan, whereas the applications associated with ERP are clustered under the label of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. However, D365FO is exclusively available within the framework of the Unified Operations Plan and incorporates the independent applications - Dynamics 365 for Retail and Dynamics 365 for Talent which jointly form the powerful Dynamics 365 program.

With the help of this article, one can have a clear view regarding up gradation of the business process’s functionalities through Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement by utilizing webhooks as well as serverless applications. In general, webhooks are remarkably advantageous methods that facilitate smooth implementation of event reactions. These offer an effective mechanism in which an application of the server-side system will be enabled to notify the application of the client-side system regarding the occurrence of a brand-new event on the server.

However, as the ease of use is the most powerful aspect of webhooks, any of the system which has the ability to send an HTTP command is perfectly capable of delivering an event to various systems that offer support for webhooks. Moreover, this implies that the webhooks execute a point-to-point communication since the source system should be aware of sending an HTTP request while the receiving system should be capable of accepting those HTTP requests. Otherwise, in the absence of webhooks, notifying other systems regarding the occurrence of events might require significantly higher efforts with regard to development due to the dissimilarities in payload formatting, service layers, and authentication schemes.

In fact, few of these systems require to make use of exclusive Software Development Kits (SDKs) as they involve complex working processes such as forwarding of an event notification from Dynamics 365 to Salesforce to maintain record synchronization, managing important documents & archives, and sending an SMS with the help of Twilio platform. The webhooks provides an effective platform to overcome these hurdles by providing a simpler model for authentication that incorporates a parameter passing mechanism and HTTP - a high-level communication protocol. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, this happens only under the specified condition, in which both the sender as well as the receiver must be capable of implementing the webhooks. However, even though Dynamics 365 supports outbound integration for webhooks through workflow activities or plug-ins, only some of the systems are qualified to receive these webhook requests. Here, the Azure Functions come into the picture that triggers HTTP requests where these triggers can be readily customized to respond to any kind of webhooks.

As a serverless computing platform, the powerful Microsoft Azure Functions supports to reduce the gap between Dynamics 365 and other systems by enabling the users to process a lightweight integration code. However, it requires a developer to customize the coding inside the Azure Functions as well as the SDKs of receiving systems which can be easily extracted from Dynamics 365. Although, the implementation of webhooks within Dynamics 365 requires slighter knowledge of programming, developing an Azure Function for webhook is pretty simple to work - utilizes inbound payload that carrying added/modified data over Dynamics 365 and convert it into the payload which can be easily admitted by the receiving systems. As webhook consists of merely the payload along with the message that has been sent by Dynamics 365, the developer must select the option of HTTP binding at the time of creating an Azure Function webhook. It indicates that one can easily test Azure Function webhook with the help of HTTP application without utilizing Dynamics 365.

From the business perspective, the developer has the choice of either creating 3 independent webhooks and employing them with Dynamics 365 or creating only one webhook and extracting the services from other applications as per the requirement. Usually, the developers create numerous stand-alone webhooks keeping reusability in the mind and an advanced business process webhook to extract functions from other applications. Moreover, they required to reconfigure Dynamics 365 to build a business process webhook.

However, resolving the complexity involved with the receiving system’s SDKs is an extremely challenging task for any of the Microsoft dynamics CRM developers and that force to create several webhooks simultaneously. For instance, the service of Twilio is expected to have the ability to call back the Azure Function by asserting the reasons concerned with additional security associated with some of the operations. However, there are several different ways to ease the connectivity with targeted systems by writing a brand-new HTTP API Gateway or leveraging an existing one. The presence of API Gateway certainly eliminates the requirement of creating 3 individual webhooks since the Gateway effectively replaces the highly significant SDKs. Described as “webhook as service”, the API Gateway effectively summarizes the complexity involved with each of the receiving systems which leaves the developers with the only job of developing an independent Azure Function webhook and calling of API Gateway through HTTP requests.

Summing Up

Some of the key advantages of integrating Dynamics 365 with webhooks are enhanced speed to market, simplified point-to-point communication topology, and easier maintenance of business process integration logic facilitated by Azure Functions. Along with serverless computing, Azure Function webhooks provides an efficient model to develop comprehensive solutions for business process integration to leverage cloud-based computing services. Moreover, the incorporation of an API Gateway further simplifies the business process implementation by eradicating the complexities across SDK development.